Classroom discourse: The promise and complexity of dialogic practice

We estimate that, on average, an English primary teacher poses over 60,000 questions and follows up pupil responses with over 30,000 evaluations in every year of classroom lessons. This talk is shaped by deeply ingrained habits, resulting in part from an estimated 13,000 hours spent as a pupil watching others’ teaching practice (Lortie 1975). However, a recent resurgence of interest in classroom discourse among educational researchers and policy makers is focusing attention on patterns of teacher talk. This attention, in turn, is placing demands upon teachers that they transform their talk, making conscious and informed choices about what had heretofore normally been second nature. How should teachers and teacher educators respond to these demands? What do they need to know and understand about classroom discourse? In addressing these questions we review a broad consensus emerging from three decades of research on the topic, according to which (i) the way teachers and pupils talk in the classroom is crucially important, but (ii) the dominant pattern of classroom discourse is problematically monologic, so (iii) it should be replaced with more dialogic models. While we find much merit in this conventional wisdom, in this chapter we also show its limitations, arguing that teaching and classroom interaction are far more complicated and problematic than is typically captured by descriptions of and prescriptions for dialogue.